Reflections at the Intersection of American History, Religion, Politics, and Academic Life

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Keith Grant Reports From the 2014 Omohundro Conference in Halifax

It is summer conference-going season and The Way of Improvement Leads Home is on the beat. A few days ago Liz Covart reported from the New York State History Conference in Poughkeepsie. Today we hear from Keith S. Grant, a PhD candidate in history at the University of New Brunswick, Canada who studies evangelicalism and print culture in the Atlantic World. Keith reflects on last week's 20th annual conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He can be reached at keith.grant[at]unb.ca. --JF

Here is Keith's report

Halifax, Nova Scotia, played host to the 20th
Annual OIEAHC conference, the theme of which was “the consequences of war.” The
program was
impressive, with a nice overlap of themes, allowing conversations to span
sessions, and to spill into the hallways and onto Twitter (#OIANNUAL).

The keynote address by Jack Greene urged a reconsideration
of the formative significance of peacetime for early America, and not only the
convulsions of war. To make his
case, he focused on the quarter century from the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) to
the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739), and examined the non-martial
explanations provided by Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ramsay (1749-1815),
among others, for the expansion of colonial society in that period. Through his
exposition of these writers, Greene suggested that peacetime reveals what an
emphasis on wars obscures: America was transformed, not so much by metropolitan
authority or military conquest, but by the adaptive agency of the settlers themselves.
Focusing on conflict tends to shift attention to the strength of empire, and
away from the profound transformations wrought by settlers adapting European societies
to new conditions. The continent, he argued, was not won on battlefields, but
on the frontiers of settlement.

However,
such a narrative can—and did—slide into a kind of “white legend”—a more benign,
British, and Protestant alternative to the Spanish “black legend” of American
colonization. Variations on the “white legend” can be found in Smith, Ramsay,
their nineteenth century successors, and in some of what now passes as
“heritage.” But, Greene argued, such
a narrative did not take into account the overwhelming costs paid by enslaved
Africans and dispossessed indigenous peoples (and Acadians and Jamaican Maroons).

I’m not
sure if the lecture provoked the conversation Greene intended. Most of those
who came to the microphone during Q & A were senior scholars who were
themselves taught or mentored by Greene. They questioned whether peacetime can
so neatly be distinguished from the wars that led to new treaty arrangements.
They observed that “peace” did not extend to the interior of Africa. They asked
about the agency and contributions of African and Native Americans. Most strongly,
they insisted that in the period between wars there was no peace, but systemic
violence perpetrated through enslavement and dispossession; Greene’s
qualifications to that effect did not sufficiently alter the “white legend.” Although
it may be that a war story obscures settler (rather than metropolitan) agency,
a narrative of peace can paper over the violence on which those settler
achievements was predicated.

Of course I
can’t say something about every paper or session, so here are a few themes that continue to percolate as I
reflect on #OIANNUAL 2014.

There were
several very good papers on aspects of “loyalism,”
which collectively helped to tease apart the polarity of patriot/loyalist. Christopher
Minty argued that loyalism in New York was not born de novo in the heat of Revolution, but instead emerged from
long-standing partisanship. With the help of social network analysis, Minty
showed how DeLanceyite social mobilization (including a range of print
strategies) and “everyday sociability” (i.e. racking up huge tavern tabs) brought
together “would-be loyalists” in the years before the Revolution. Liam Riordan
offered two surprising pairings, both of which stretch our definition of
“loyalism”—a term big enough to include William Martin Johnson (a Georgia
doctor and captain with the New York Volunteers) and Thomas Peters (a former North Carolina slave and sergeant in
the Black Pioneers, later a leader in the Sierra Leone colony). Riordan also
suggested that both loyalists also shared much in common with ordinary Revolutionary
soldiers, like Joseph Plumb Martin; no matter who was victorious, all
experienced the disruptions of war and the difficulties of resettling in its
aftermath. Christopher Sparshott invited us to reconceptualize Revolutionary
New York as a refugee camp, and “loyalists” as those who, like all displaced
persons, adopted strategies of survival. By examining little-used “memorials”
(claims for compensation), Sparshott demonstrated that many New Yorkers framed
their loyalism in terms of practical suffering in wartime conditions.

Humanitarianism, it turns out, had a
long career before Enlightenment
reformers and Romantic idealists made it their own. Erica Charters traced the long
development of European conventions for the humane treatment of POWs, including
military, legal, nationalistic, and religious motivations. By the time of the
American War of Independence, public opinion was the court that adjudicated
what constituted humane treatment of POWs. Wendy Churchill argued that
professional self-fashioning, as much as idealism, drove eighteenth-century
military medical practitioners to adopt the rhetoric of “humanity.”

To mention
just one paper from the excellent panel on religion
and antislavery, Sarah Crabtree proposed a solution to the puzzle of Quaker
reticence in the abolition movement. She suggested that antislavery reformers
were connected through Quaker networks
and influenced by Quaker ideology.
While reformers continued to benefit from the infrastructure of Quaker
financing and connections, Quaker trans-Atlantic cosmopolitanism did not sit
easily with an increasingly nationalistic conception of antislavery. In perhaps
the most quotable moment of the conference, Crabtree observed that Quakers were
comfortable as subjects, but not as citizens.

The host
province, Nova Scotia, was certainly
not neglected in the program. Alexandra Montgomery described the enthusiastic
(if not completely successful) promotion of Nova Scotia settlement schemes by
Philadelphians, including Benjamin Franklin. Afua Cooper showed that the
history of enslavement in Nova Scotia complicates the narrative of Nova Scotia
as a refuge for freed blacks or runaway slaves. And Keith Mercer offered a
brilliant cultural history of the commemoration of the Shannon’s defeat of the Chesapeake
during the War of 1812.

Several
papers probed the question of black and
indigenous agency in the face of colonization. Maria Bollettino (in a rich
plenary session on the consequences of war and the black Atlantic) explored the
significance of black combatants in mid-C18 Caribbean conflicts. Although Britain
armed blacks to protect slavery, rather than to abolish it, Bollettino suggests
that their contributions seeded imaginations for how blacks could later play a
range of imperial roles. Thomas Peace argued that colonial day schools in the
eighteenth century north east (as opposed to later boarding or residential
schools) were an important part of local indigenous communities. Even though
the schools were part of a larger colonizing program, skills in literacy made
it possible for indigenous communities to resist colonizing pressures,
especially through petitions about land. Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, similarly, argued
that Haudenosaunee women mitigated the effects of the early republic’s
“civilization program” by appropriating those skills that were useful to them
(e.g. spinning), while maintaining traditional ways.

Perhaps the
best question
of the conference came from Lori Daggar, who wondered how themes related to indigenous
peoples (and I think this applies to African Americans) can be more fully
integrated into conference programs, so that these themes are not left to
specialist panels. Returning to the first evening’s conversation, the question
remains, how can the narratives of professional and popular history more
seamlessly include black and indigenous agency, and account for both colonial
achievement and violence?

Thanks to
Justin Roberts (Dalhousie University), Elizabeth Mancke (University of New
Brunswick), John Reid (Saint Mary’s University), and the OIEAHC team for great
hospitality and for making a space for stimulating conversations.